up and up in paris and london

Having spent a week in London, making a dick of myself by tacking an automatic s’il vous plait on the end of every drink order, I’m back in Paris, dealing with the reality that it takes me five minutes to read a slogan on a poster. I’ve seen both cities at their best recently—in Paris I’ve had visitors to make it all shiny, and in London I got to spend time with people I’ve been missing and find that everyone’s doing well, which is always nice.

In fact, I had an unexpected reunion with some girls I haven’t seen since we used to share a house in second-year uni. It was odd to be reminded of that time. I was in an imploding relationship, eating a no fat, no sugar, no carbohydrate diet, watching my hip bones protrude and collecting amethyst crystals. Amy and Eef were trying to plan a trans-continental move, experimenting with compost and meeting strange people in bars, who would subsequently ring our doorbell whenever they found themselves in the neighbourhood. At three a.m. And we were all being fleeced by a beautiful, intelligent heroin addict who was crashing on our floor (we all wondered why she was always falling asleep with lit cigarettes in her hand, why her parents would buy her groceries but refused to loan her twenty bucks, and, in the end, where our rent money was disappearing to). Now these two are happily established in the Netherlands—Amy is doing a physics degree, and researching nuclear fusion at Oxford on her summer break, and Eef is channeling her formidable joie de vivre into the final year of a photography course. And I still don’t really have a clue what I’m doing, but I hope soon to be clueless—and gainfully employed—in Italy. It all seems sufficient. Fortunate, even.

summer in paris with jenn and pete
The bars of the eleventh are in top form, and groups of happy, beer-drinking young couples have booted the old men off the petanque courts. It’s a fun time to be in Paris, and Pete and Jenn had the energy of people on a short vacation, so we did lots. I don’t normally hold with paying to climb tall things—I find most cities look sort of forlorn and pointless when seen from high up. But from the towers of Notre Dame we could spy into all the little apartment courtyards and narrow streets, and for a moment I felt the hard shell of the city crack open, and reveal a wink of its vivid, dense, chattering past. Gotcha, I thought. Afterwards we went for drinks at a barge café that was moored nearby. From there, we could people-watch at leisure. As each cruise boat passed Notre Dame, all the people on board would hold their cameras aloft to it, silently, simultaneously, as in prayer.

We went to the catacombs too. In the late 18th century, when several of Paris’ over-crowded cemeteries became a public health risk, the bones were disinterred and moved to abandoned quarries under the 16th Arrondissement. In the 1850s, all the skulls and femurs were arranged into pretty patterns along the tunnel walls (there’s five or six million skeletons down there, so that’s a lot of material to work with—Matthew Barney would surely have sold his firstborn son to be in charge of that project) and the catacombs were opened as a tourist attraction. We enjoyed seeing the bones in their heart and crucifix formations, all interspersed with improving quotes about mortality, but I was most impressed by the hoard of confiscated bones at the exit. I asked the attendant had they really been stolen. He tapped his fingers over a skull and two femurs. “This morning, yesterday and… last Tuesday, I think. Bizarre, uh?” But he didn’t really seem that surprised.

We made three attempts to crack the August queues at the Eiffel Tower. After the final unsuccessful effort, we cheered ourselves up with some second-hand English book shopping. From a listing in Pete’s guide book we found a place called Tea and Tattered Pages, which sounded like it would fit the bill. The American woman who was staffing it talked ceaselessly at us while she made us some cream cheese bagels. She told us she’d been in Paris since ’67, so I asked her about the ’68 riots. Unfortunately she was on a short holiday in Norway when they happened—the thought of the fun she’d missed still made her grimace and pull her hair, 35 years later. She also explained to us that Parisians used to be smaller than they are now, because oppressive parenting techniques stunted their growth. She demonstrated these techniques with verve, swatting the air and barking instructions at imaginary down-trodden little Parisians of yesteryear. When I told her her theory seemed a little bit far-fetched, she conceded they probably didn’t drink enough milk in those days either. Then she made Peter change his tea order from English Breakfast to Lapsang Souchong (“otherwise I could die of boredom just watching you drink it”) and then asked him to help her pump up a flat bicycle tyre, and he obliged.

in london
on the other hand, there was the Fox Reformed, a wine bar in Stoke Newington. I asked the proprietor, who was squeaky-voiced and tufty-haired and wore big moony spectacles, for a glass of beaujolais. He asked me if I wanted it chilled or at room temperature. I was a bit disconcerted, so I asked him what his preference would be. “I should think it has bugger all to do with me, and everything to do with you,” he squeaked. His girlfriend leaned across the bar to me. She seemed to be one of those perfectly normal women who marry intense, under-socialised nerds out of affection and a vague wish to protect. She whispered tactfully, “The beaujolais can be a touch soupy on very hot days, but I don’t think you need have it chilled just now.” So I didn’t.

London is sprawling and magnificently ugly compared with Paris, but I like it very much. I like its tough, aggro energy and its tar-black sense of humour, and its free museums and its red buses and its public notices. In fact, I sometimes think it wouldn’t matter if every place I went to was like that big, white, featureless room in THX-1138, as long as there were signs around to keep me amused. A breath-takingly irresponsible ad for an online casino urged me ‘never to let a defeat have the last word.’ A notice on the bus said it was licensed for 17 ‘standees’, which annoyed me at first for its grammatical inaccuracy, but then I got thinking about what a ‘standee’ might be. I imagined an important-looking man lying prone, grimacing, while a woman teetered on his chest in stiletto heels, and that enlivened my journey no end.

Then there is Lil’s street sign. Her new house is on a pretty street called the West Bank, in the Orthodox Jewish part of town. Go figure. It’s a great area. Lots of trees and nice cafés, and cute kids running around in yamulkahs, their forelocks still too short to curl. And Lil has a beautiful, big room with space to paint and play guitar, and a pear tree out the back that’s taller than the house. She also has a lovely new girlfriend. Lily and Den are now officially, delightfully, an item. Den has a new house too, and she has got rid of a lot of the spirits who were bugging her, both of which things she’s very pleased about. I said it was a pity I hadn’t thought to ask them who killed JFK. “They still drop in every now and then, I’ll ask them.”

Later that night when we were all going to sleep, Den yelled across the room to me. “It was Archibald, Kate.”
“What?”
“Who killed JFK.”
“You mean Oswald?”
She was quiet for a second, presumably in consultation.
“That’s it, yeah.”
“Oh jeez, Den, that’s what everybody says. Get some sleep.”
There was silence for another long moment.
“And Jack the Ripper was some bloke called John Hewitt. An American, apparently.”
Now that was news to me.

I also went to see Frida Kahlo at the Tate Modern, which had most of her major works so I didn’t mind the ten pounds’ entry. Best of all was her self-portrait against a yellow ground. I’ve seen it lots of times in books, but on the wall there was a direness, a sort of stricken dignity that I’d never seen in it before. I wonder why that is with some artworks—like there’s a spirit in the paint itself that can’t cross over into reproductions. And I passed a happy birthday evening watching a super-8 film festival. My favourite was an amusing one with a dog in. I got a DVD of Don’t Look Now from Pete, a cute notebook and some new drawings from Lily, and a tin whistle from my sister. Excellent.

And I applied for some teaching jobs in Italy. I can’t be doing with this drifting forever, I need to belong to a place again. In the metro I see scowling boys dressed in camouflage carrying big machine guns, and I want to march up and demand, what country are we living in, for god’s sake? Except that I can’t say that properly in French, and I’m not really living here, am I, it’s more like a long pause than real life. Or I see a street name that I should remember from history class, but I don’t bother to look it up and find out why. Or I see a photograph of Beckett sitting in a left bank café, and I wonder what attracted him so much to this place. Unless I learn French, I will probably never really get it. It’s been fun, all this idle speculation from the outside, but I need to be somewhere long enough to get beneath the surface a little.